The Copper Heart

by Sarah Painter

  The notebook was about the size of her hand with a hardcover and black elastic holding it shut. Inside were columns of numbers and notes which were not written in anything resembling English. Shorthand, possibly, but a quick google showed that it wasn’t the official version. A code of Charlie’s own devising?

  Lydia sat down and went through the pages carefully, looking for anything which might refer to familiar names or businesses in Camberwell. An entry marked MKM had a string of numbers in different pens, written presumably at different times. MKM could easily be Mark Kendal mobiles. But it could be a thousand other things, as well.

  Lydia packed it all back into the cloth bag for easy transportation and put the floorboard back into place. She locked the house up carefully, wondering what other surprises it still held.

  * * *

  Lydia didn’t know if it was seeing the old photographs of Charlie and her dad, but she told Aiden she wasn’t available the next day and called Emma to see if she was free. By happy coincidence, Emma had a trip planned to the National Gallery and agreed to meet Lydia afterwards for a walk along the embankment.

  The following afternoon, the sky was pale blue and spring sunshine made the river sparkle. It reflected off Emma’s sunglasses, and the can of lager that somebody had left on a low wall, and made dappled patterns on the ground beneath the trees which lined the embankment.

  They had caught up on the essentials of life and Lydia had been reassured that Archie and Maisie were thriving and that Tom, Emma’s husband, was doing much better health-wise. In turn, she had filled Emma in on the last few months with the broadest of strokes.

  ‘When you say Charlie has ‘gone’. Is that a euphemism?’

  ‘No.’ Lydia took a deep breath. ‘At least, I don’t think so. As far as I’m aware, he’s alive.’

  ‘And you’ve got his job?’

  ‘Yes. Kind of. I’ve delegated most of it to other people in the family. But I’m the last word. Theoretically, at least.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Emma said. ‘That’s major.’

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been around,’ Lydia said it quickly, like ripping off a plaster. She wondered how many more times she would say these exact words to Emma and how many more times she would be forgiven before her oldest friend cut her losses.

  ‘I need a drink,’ Emma said.

  ‘Pub?’ Lydia perked up.

  ‘Coffee.’ Emma was making a beeline for a nearby booth. Standing in front of Lava Java, she glanced at the menu. ‘Maisie has been waking up all week. Nothing serious, night terrors, but I’m bloody knackered.’

  Night terrors sounded extremely serious. Lydia was struck, all over again, by Emma’s calm competence in the face of astounding horror. Whatever depravity or danger Lydia’s job revealed, the intricacies and responsibilities of parenting never ceased to impress and alarm her.

  Large coffees in hand, they resumed their stroll. ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Being in charge.’

  ‘Exhausting,’ Lydia said. ‘And scary. I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  Emma pulled a sympathetic face. ‘I guess he didn’t leave a handy guidebook?’

  Lydia shook her head. ‘Plus, I don’t really want to do things the way he did. At least, not everything. He was…’ She lifted the lid on her coffee cup and blew on the liquid to cool it down.

  ‘I’ve heard the rumours,’ Emma said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I don’t mind you being busy,’ Emma said. ‘I understand. You know I’ve always understood your hours are weird and long and you have to disappear into cases sometimes to get them done. I get all that.’

  ‘I know, but it’s still rubbish for you. I want to be a better friend. More steady. You deserve a better friend.’

  Emma pulled a wry face. ‘I’ve got plenty of friends. I’m not sitting by the phone waiting for you to call.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Lydia said. ‘I know that. I just feel bad.’

  ‘Well don’t,’ Emma said briskly. ‘I’ve told you a million times. You don’t need to worry about me.’

  Lydia tried her coffee. Still too hot.

  ‘I think it’s more than busyness though.’ Emma was watching her with a wary expression.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think that sometimes, like maybe recently, you keep away from me deliberately. You lost your uncle and I know you two were close. You can talk to me, you know. You don’t have to push me away.’

  Emma was right, she had been close to Charlie Crow, and there was a confused soup of emotions regarding his absence. But she didn’t deserve a caring, sharing session, with the sympathy and understanding she knew Emma would provide. She felt guilty and that was only right. She had betrayed Charlie. More than that, she had done the very worst thing she could do to a Crow. Worse even than killing him, she had put him in a cage.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it now?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Lydia said. ‘I’m fine. And I’m sorry I’ve been distant. You’re right, some of it has been deliberate. I was waiting to see how things settled down. I didn’t want you caught in… Anything.’ Lydia kept Emma separate from the Crows, but it wouldn’t take a genius to work out that she still kept in touch with her friend from school. A single unguarded conversation with her mum would do it. And if someone came looking for leverage or retribution… It didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘You’re doing your usual thing,’ Emma said, annoyance clear.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘Pushing everybody around you away. I don’t know why you think you have to do everything on your own. It’s not weak to need people.’

  Well that was blatantly untrue. And not the point. ‘I need to keep you safe.’ She didn’t add ‘and your children’ because she couldn’t even form the words. The idea that she could be the cause of any harm coming to Maisie or Archie was, quite literally, unspeakable.

  Emma regarded Lydia over her coffee cup for a long moment. ‘You don’t, though. I’m a grown woman. I make my own choices.’

  Lydia opened her mouth to explain that it wasn’t about choices or adulthood, but life and death. She encountered some very bad people in her line of work and now she was walking around with a bullseye drawn on her back. Emma, however, hadn’t finished.

  ‘And you can’t seem to see the irony. The more you push everybody away, the more you keep secrets and tell half-truths, the worse off we all are. I don’t expect you to be available, but I do need you to stop hiding.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lydia said. She wanted to tell Emma it was for her own protection, but she also didn’t want to frighten her friend. And she was afraid it would sound like a bullshit excuse, anyway.

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ Emma touched her arm. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Lydia forced a small smile. ‘Old habits.’

  Emma nodded. ‘Good. Now, I’ve got to run.’ She checked the time on her phone. ‘School pick-up awaits.’

  After hugging Emma goodbye, Lydia stopped by the booths at Westminster Pier. She recognised the man with bleached-blond hair that she had spoken to before and waited for the queue of people to clear before approaching. ‘Do you remember me?’

  He nodded fast. ‘I was going to call.’

  Lydia had just intended to check in, to keep her request fresh in the man’s mind. She hadn’t expected any actual information. That was the thing about investigative work. You shook a lot of trees before getting hit on the head with an apple. ‘Why were you going to call? What’s happened?’

  ‘There was a woman asking about that day. Like you were.’

  ‘A woman asked you about the day Alejandro Silver collapsed over there,’ Lydia gestured to the spot, making herself absolutely clear. That was another thing she had learned over time. Don’t be ambiguous when questioning a source.

  He nodded eagerly. ‘Yeah, yeah. She asked all about it. What he looked like. Who was with him. All that.’

  ‘Wha
t did she look like?’

  ‘I dunno. Dark hair?’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Monday. I was off yesterday.’

  ‘You remember anything else about her? How was she dressed?’

  ‘Smart. Black.’

  ‘She was black?’

  ‘No. Definitely white. She was wearing a black suit or something. Businessy. But nice.’ There was a bit of leer as he recollected the woman. This was the kind of man who showed every single thought on his face. His eyes probably turned into the shape of chicken drumsticks when he was hungry.

  ‘And she spoke posh.’

  ‘Got it,’ Lydia said. She gave the man another twenty. ‘Next time, call me right away. Okay?’

  Chapter Nine

  On the way through Camberwell, Lydia couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being followed. She took evasive action, stopping to pretend to look in shop windows while checking out the pedestrians and traffic in the reflections, walking in and quickly out of a deli and through a cafe she knew had two different street entrances. She didn’t see anybody following, but kept up the looping walk, avoiding her usual route and doubling back at random times in the hopes of either catching sight of the surveillance or forcing them to stop. She expected to catch sight of the Pearl girl or, perhaps, someone from Mr Smith’s department. She wasn’t naïve enough to believe that just because she had told him she wasn’t working with him any longer, that he would simply accept it. Eventually she got close enough to The Fork to walk past her dark grey Audi and she considered getting in and going for a drive. The feeling of being watched had gone, though, and she hadn’t seen anything suspicious. She was being paranoid.

  She could go home, now, but somehow she kept on walking, looping around and around Camberwell like a caged animal pacing the confines of its environment. Everything was different without Charlie at the helm. People spoke to her differently, people looked at her differently and everything was suddenly her problem. The investigator part of Lydia loved the insider information and the sense of seeing beneath the veil. But at the same time, she felt like her jacket was too tight and she couldn’t take a proper breath.

  Without realising, Lydia had looped around and back and was now passing St Giles Church on the main street. Not knowing why, she ducked through the entrance and into the quiet garden behind the church. Lydia wasn’t religious, but she had a soft spot for this particular church and the saint it was named after. St Giles, the patron saint of the poor, destitute and the crooked. The last being the physically deformed, rather than criminal. Plus, they held a weekly jazz club in the crypt below the church with live music and a licensed bar. That was the kind of church activity Lydia could get behind.

  The headstones were against the brick walls surrounding the garden and Lydia found herself walking slowly past each one, trying to read the worn inscriptions, like it was a pilgrimage to the past. This wasn’t an important place to the Crows. She knew that, but still she felt something here. Something tugging at her senses, dragging her through the public garden and along the wall of memorials, looking for an unknown destination.

  Most of the graves had been moved to the Camberwell cemetery, and the remaining space remade into a garden, with grass and trees and benches, but there were still a handful of memorial stones against one boundary wall and the occasional tomb dotted on the grass. Two children, around Archie and Maisie’s ages were playing on top of one. She caught the lines of a nursery rhythm being chanted in victory. ‘I’m the king of the castle’. It was a good mix, Lydia thought, the reminder of death in the midst of life.

  And with that thought, the hairs raised on the back of Lydia’s neck and she felt the unmistakable sensation of being watched. Turning slowly, Lydia cast a casual look around. The young father with the two small children wasn’t looking in her direction. He was standing with one hand in his jeans pocket, head bent over his phone. There was nobody else there.

  Turning back, Lydia pretended to be focused on the gravestones. She was reading the words without really meaning to when a phrase jumped out: ‘Sacred in memory of Alice Elizabeth wife of John Crow of this parish who departed this life on the 14th April 1846.’ She wondered how that grave had been missed in the mass exodus to the Family tomb in Camberwell Cemetery. Had this Alice Crow done something to piss off the rest of the Family? It would have to be something pretty bad to have her left out of the Family resting place for all of eternity. Or it was just a sign of how little stock the Crows put into churches and graves. The earthly remains of Crows could be anywhere, their spirits would still be high in the sky. Lydia closed her eyes and gripped her coin until she could feel them, mingling with live Crows, borrowing their sight, feeling the air riffling through feathers and senses sharp.

  Pearl. Just a trace, but Lydia felt it and it pulled her down from the freedom of the sky and back to the green earth. She turned around to scan the park again and saw Ash step from behind a tree close by. ‘Feathers, Ash,’ she said. ‘You scared me.’

  His expression didn’t change for a moment and the blankness reminded her of the Pearl girl who had followed her in Burgess Park. It crossed her mind that she should perhaps be a little more careful. She was clearly too easy to find. Lydia instantly rejected the notion. She wasn’t going to let anything curb her enjoyment of her city. Besides, if somebody took a hit out on her, avoiding the park wasn’t going to keep her safe. They could turn up at any one of her known haunts. Or, as someone had chillingly told her once, they could just poison her food. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’ve found it,’ Ash said, becoming animated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve done it before.’

  Lydia knew that the Pearl Family, or the core members of the family, known as the court, had taken a girl. Her name was Lucy Bunyan and one of her ancestors had signed a contract with a company which had stated they had the rights to a first-born daughter. It was creepy and definitely not legally binding, but that hadn’t stopped the Pearl King from plucking the sixteen year old from Highgate Woods and keeping her prisoner until Lydia had disrupted the party. Months earlier, unbeknown to Lydia at the time, Ash had been released by the Pearls after spending twenty years in their company. Ash knew about Lucy, but she gently reminded him.

  ‘No. Not just her,’ Ash shook his head, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. He was still just as thin as when he had first re-entered the world, the sharp planes of his face showing that he wasn’t eating enough. Or that the effects of twenty years of not eating enough were difficult to eradicate in a few months. Lydia felt a spurt of anger toward the Pearls and was relieved that she was still capable of caring. Ever since she had allowed Mr Smith to take her uncle away, she had been battling a growing numbness.

  ‘Let’s walk.’ Lydia didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention and she thought the motion might keep Ash calm. Instead he began pacing up and down in front of the gravestones, waving his arms as he spoke. ‘I found it. I found the pattern.’

  ‘What pattern?’

  ‘It’s been going back decades. I went to the newspaper archive in the British Library. I know everything is supposed to be online, now, but I wanted to be sure, and I found them. Kids go missing. I only searched for sixteen year olds, but there might be loads more. Different ages, I mean.’

  ‘What makes you think it’s them?’

  ‘Every twenty years a sixteen year old goes missing from Highgate Woods.’

  Lydia paused. ‘All from the same place?’

  Ash nodded. ‘There was one, in nineteen twenty one which was Hampstead Heath and another where they didn’t have a last known location, but the age and timing was right. And they were never found. None of them were ever found. Apart from Lucy.’

  ‘And you,’ Lydia said. ‘You need to stay away from Highgate.’

  ‘I told you, I’ve been at the library.’

  Lydia thought about the girl. ‘Have you seen any Pearls? They use kids. Have you been followed?’

 
Ash looked at Lydia with a mixture of confusion and anger. ‘You think I’m weak. I’m not stupid. This happened to me. You think I wouldn’t notice if I saw one of them?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re stupid,’ Lydia tried to placate him. She didn’t want to say ‘you’re traumatised and are clearly not thinking clearly or looking after yourself’ so she settled on ‘I’m just worried about you. I want you to stay safe.’

  ‘I’m being careful,’ Ash said. ‘But I won’t stop. I can’t.’

  * * *

  Back at The Fork, Lydia picked up a mug of coffee from Angel and headed upstairs to work. She found Jason meditatively making a hot chocolate. He had branched out from cereal and tea and Lydia wasn’t sorry. She opened the fridge and passed him the canister of whipped cream. It felt a little light, but there were three more lined up on the shelf and a catering-size bag of marshmallows she had stolen from the cafe kitchen on the countertop. In her continuing effort to stop drinking hard liquor all day every day, hot chocolate with all the trimmings was a helpful distraction.

  She told him about the mysterious woman who had been asking about Alejandro at Westminster Pier.

  ‘Maria?’ Jason said.

  ‘Sounds like it,’ Lydia said. ‘And something else occurred to me this afternoon.’